I'm glad you asked this question. I am starting to suspect I have Endometriosis and that it started after taking large doses of Vitamin A. I had excellent periods for three years on the paleoish diet, then all the sudden this year I have excruciating pelvic pain radiating over my entire body. I am going to discontinue Cod liver oil and see what happens. I really don't want to believe it's bad for me, as I had a lot of skin problems go away from taking it and I'm not taking very much, just four of the capsules a day. But either way, I don't know if I have endo, it's just something I'm going to try.

GRR, sometimes I think this whole thing is like a health problem whack a mole...one problem fixes, another comes up. But perhaps I was naive to think that CLO wasn't a supplement, that it was just a "food" in a capsule. I have a pretty dim view of most supplements, but I suppose I wasn't skeptical enough of CLO.

I had suspected endometriosis and confirmed ovarian cysts and abnormally heavy and painful periods when I started 'paleo' two years ago, within 6 months all of my hormonal (including acne) and period problems had vanished and things continue to be excellent in that department.

I eat high in retinol most days from foods, but have never supplemented beyond an occasional small dose of CLO and frankly, am a bit scared at the high doses of retinol I see many people in this community inbibing.

I would go with the high vitamin cod liver oil. You don't have to take very much to get the vitamins you need while avoiding the omega 3's. I have read a lot of testamonials on vitamin A and menstrual problems and would not hesitate to use the clo to see if it helped. I would make sure though that I used the blue ice fermented clo as it seems to be the only one that is on the market now with the ratios that are natural to the clo of the past and do not contain manipulated vitamin levels.

You can get Vit A supplements derived from CLO. I get the whole foods brand which uses soybean oil as a carrier but the amount is pretty negligible(less then .5g).

If you like liver eating around a pound a week is pretty sufficient for Vit A.

I don't take vitamin A by itself. I make sure to get all the fat-soluble vitamins either in supplement (but I make sure it's from natural sources) or in food. If you take vitamin A with vitamin D3 in particular (or get them together in food, but that's harder with D3), each is protective against an overdose of the other.

Vitamin A is vital for reproductive health and for proper growth of the fetus if you plan on having kids; despite official health warnings against the true vitamin, embryos and fetuses can't convert beta carotene but do have a mechanism for controlling how much vitamin A they get. (And I got that via ScienceDaily; do a search at the site for vitamin A and it should come up on one of the search result pages.) Eye defects, tooth enamel defects, and urinary tract defects are common in children deprived prenatally of vitamin A. My daughter had two out of the three; I didn't have enough A either in my diet or in my prenatal vitamin when I was carrying her. I am seeing prenatals nowadays without beta carotene. This is getting scary.

So I don't know why all of a sudden you were having problems. Could be a prostaglandin thing, could be a fatty-acid imbalance, could just be you need more minerals. (Do you drink bone broth?) You could have developed a cyst; hope you asked your GYN to check.

As for the notion that we should never supplement, ancestral peoples may not have had pills per se, but there were foods they ate that were intended as supplements. They didn't label them such in so many words, but that's what the foods were: fish eggs, liver, other animal organs, high-vitamin butter, etc. And they had food traditions which we no longer have--but we know about micronutrients. So maybe we need to be a bit easier on ourselves about this. By all means, look for high quality and know what you're getting--but there's a time and a place to get the extra help.

And I realize this is from over a year ago, but it came up in Google search results, so here I am.